


Nonlethal Takedowns

by foxsgloves



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Crack Treated Seriously, Just Guards Being Guys Being Dudes, M/M, gameplay mechanics taken to their natural and most silly conclusions, it's crack o'clock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-08
Updated: 2016-07-08
Packaged: 2018-07-22 10:30:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7432957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxsgloves/pseuds/foxsgloves
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's no guard-duty bonding activity better than getting blood-choked unconscious, then dumped in a side alley on top of your crush.<br/>Or, legendary assassin Corvo Attano accidentally plays matchmaker.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nonlethal Takedowns

**Author's Note:**

> ... I like to dump the unconscious guards in cuddle piles in the hopes they'll bond when they wake up.

Gold, honor, and glory.  That’s what all the posters promised when Jack Hooper, a fresh-faced lad—well, a boy with pimply cheeks and a growing nose, at least, though not even his own mother would call it fresh, and fairly so—signed on with the Dunwall Guard.  Those had been brighter days, when there was still a smooth shine on the edge of his Guard-issue saber and his boots were always polished and some lucky night patrols ended with hot cider in his tin cup.

Now he was lucky to get a mouthful of brackish water—which he’d swallowed down right quick before patrol, and liked it too—and get one of the tarps without the holes in them when the fog and rain came. And at the end of his long patrol shuffling up and down Clavering Street, jumping at every slight noise until his legs went heavy and wooden, there was naught to look forward to but bedding down with only the rats for company.

He thought one of them might have bitten him.  He’d woken with a pair of shallow cuts on his right shin that itched something fierce and had swollen a copper-sized halo of red all about.  Not a plague bite—otherwise he’d been shaking and foaming from the mouth on the ground right about now—but still a petty bother.  He couldn’t lean down to lift the hem of his pants leg and check it, not with Corporal Haymaker watching him across the road with eyes like a falcon, so he attempted to scratch it subtle-like with the heel of his opposite boot.

While he was swaying on his right ankle he was startled by a soft sound from behind the nearest barrier, nearly tipping over and dropping his pistol on the cobbles with an ugly clatter.  Very subtle-like.

“Oi, what’s your trouble, lad?” It was, to his great and deep embarrassment, not just him and Corporal Haymaker and the rats on patrol.  There was also his supposed partner-in-arms, one Cyril Havelock.

Cyril Havelock was the sort of fellow who had broad, strong hands with scarred-over knuckles, and hair silvering at the temples long before its time which ought to have made him look feeble but really just gave him an air of distinction, and a bright quick smile that flashed clean and white as his Gran’s one good china cup.  He was the sort of fellow who could get away with calling everyone “lad” and winking.

Cyril Havelock was just the sort of fellow Jack might or might not fall hard for in his first weeks of training and nurse a heady, shameful torch for, all through his long nights shuffling up and down Clavering Street. 

“No trouble,” Jack said quickly, bending himself in two to scrabble at his pistol.  He sent it skittering halfway down the road.

“It’s on my walk, I’ll fetch it for you, lad,” said Cyril with a wink and a clap on the shoulder.  Jack rubbed at the spot, feeling all too much like he’d walked into a wall of light arm-first.

Two minutes later Cyril was pressing his gun back into his hands and Jack grabbed it and stuffed it back in its holster so as to keep their fingers from touching any longer than strictly necessary with a mumbled “Thanks.”  He nearly dropped it again as he started at another strange noise from behind the barrier—the one he liked to think of as _his_ barrier, since he passed it so often.

“Oy!  Someone out there?”  He poked his head over the edge, sweeping his neck back and forth as he combed the shadows.  Nothing, nothing, nothing.  As he tucked his chin back over he was certain he was the color of eggplant.

“It’s the great assassin Corvo Attano, come to slit all our throats,” said Cyril.  With a squeak and a scratch, an overlarge rat scuttled around the edge of the wall.  Cyril made a grunt of disgust and flicked the butt of his cigarette in its direction, and it crawled back into the dark it came from.  Jack exhaled through his nose in relief.  Just a rat, only a rat. 

Cyril drew a flask of elixir out of the inside of his jacket and took a quick swig from it, eyeing Haymaker’s back.  Haymaker had given up staring down Jack in order to thumb through a sweaty pamphlet of _The Pearl,_ the same copy he’d been staring at nigh on three weeks.  Cyril passed the flask to Jack, who took a quick swig and tried not to think about the fact that now their lips had touched the same place, which was sort of almost like a kiss, if one looked at it in the right light.

Now his throat burned as hot as the tips of his red ears.

“Thanks,” he said as Cyril tucked the flash safely away.  It was not often anyone thought to share their ration with him.  It was not ever, actually.

“Welcome, lad. I’ve seen you around the barracks before.”  They had all seen each other round the barracks before.  There was only one barracks.  “Hooper, right?”  Cyril leaned a casual arm against the barrier, which would have got Jack’s hackles up had it been anyone else.  “You a Dunwall man?”

“I’m from a day’s downriver in Sweetwater.”  The name was ironic.  Downriver the Wrenhaven ran thick and foul with all Dunwall’s waste.  In the high heat of summer it stank like the Outsider’s worst curse.  “Joined up for a bent penny and a pair of new boots.  You?”

“Dunwall born and raised, signed on for a pretty song and naught else.  You got the better deal.” 

There were a few trickling seconds of silence in which Jack felt as though he’d been thrown a hot grenade, and, desperate to keep the conversation in the air and Cyril leaning on his favorite barricade, said, “You got any family here?”

“I do.  My aunt and her gaggle of children.”  He did not, Jack was quick to notice, mention a wife or a sweetheart. 

“Oy!  Havelock, Hooper!”  Haymaker had torn his gaze away from his torrid illustrations to shoot a toxic glare their way.  “Stop making eyes at each other and get your feet back on your routes!”

“Sorry,” said Cyril, and bumped Jack’s shoulder with his own as he passed.  “See you later at the barracks, yeah, lad?”

“Yeah, see,” said Jack, and cursed himself the whole way Cyril strolled back up to his post.

He was just adjusting his holster when all of a sudden he was sideways, his vision swiming with dim red spots, and he tried to take in a breath but found he was very unable, as there was a strong firm arm about his neck drawn tight like a noose, and his chest heaved like a useless bellows and he came to the realization that he was, in fact, most likely about to die, and if these were going to be his final moments he ought to think of something good, something good to die to, like his mother and sisters dancing in Sweetwater Square with their starched aprons flying, and the good clean scent of the fog in spring when it was still cold and pure, and hot cider and hot elixir and Cyril Havelock’s china-white smile—

The bells rang.  The bells of heaven, he thought, sluggishly, oh good, he’d made it upstairs after all, that was surely something, only the bells of heaven sounded rather like the bells of the abbey, and when he cracked open his heavy eyelids it was still black as pitch, lit only by the flickering, murky glow of a whale-oil streetlamp.

Heaven, he was reasonably certain, did not make use of whale-oil streetlamps.

With a groan he pushed himself up at the waist to look about.  He was lying half on his side in some alleyway—one of the little nooks off the main street, he knew it now, where some of the lads went to have a good long smoke in between shifts.  He was not alone.  Cyril Havelock, unconscious as a sack of rocks, lay beside him.

He grasped Cyril’s shoulder and shook, first gently, then thought to check his breathing, and so when Cyril stirred he woke to Jack pressing his left ear against his sternum.  His breathing was fine.

“Well, good morning, Hooper,” he said, blinking sleepily.  “Was I very drunk last night?”  His eyes sprang open.  “Oh.  Oh, god.”

“I think,” said Jack, in a small voice, “that I might need a smoke.”

He lit the tip of one of the cheap cigarettes from his pants pocket—the stranger who had so quickly and rudely robbed him of consciousness had also taken all of his gold, but left his good pocketwatch and his pack of cigs and his lighter.  He gave one to Cyril, too, and lifted his lighter as Cyril held it between his lips.

He checked his pocketwatch.  “There’s still twenty minutes left on our patrol.”  He sighed, shifting as prickling feeling began to return, panful and uninvited, to his left leg.  “I suppose we ought to go and report to the Corporal.”

Cyril sucked in a long drag and exhaled twin plumes of smoke through his nose.  “I’ve a better idea.  My aunt, the one I told you about?  She runs an inn the Draper’s Ward.  They’re not like to be awake at this time of night, but she lets me use the kitchen.  She’s got eggs.  I can fry an egg.  Do you fancy a fried egg, Hooper, lad?”

“Call me Jack, please, and there is nothing else I want more in the world right now than a fried egg.”

Except, perhaps, the press of Cyril’s body as the two of them crammed beneath a single coat and made their slow way down to Draper’s Ward. 

Neither paid any mind to the flicker of a shadow across the rooftops above, where a man crept silent as a cat and watched their backs with bemused amusement. 

Well, the way up Clavering Street was now clear, at any rate.  Perhaps he ought to try this sort of thing more often.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope y'all maybe enjoyed this silly little fic!


End file.
